Bitcoin, the controversial digital currency, recently made headlines for reaching a record high valuation of more than $2,700, but perhaps the bigger growth potential lies in blockchain. The technology behind bitcoin and similar cryptocurrencies is being explored by more conventional companies and businesses. VOA’s Tina Trinh reports from New York.
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A picture of a smiling Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan flanked by EU President Donald Tusk and EU Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker adorned much of Turkey’s pro-government media this week.
“Erdogan got his picture of his handshake in Brussels, which is really only what he wanted,” said political science professor Cengiz Aktar, “because he is looking for legitimacy in his new position as strongman of Turkey.”
Erdogan’s narrow referendum victory extending his presidential powers remains mired in vote-rigging allegations. EU leaders, unlike U.S. President Donald Trump, had refrained from endorsing his success.
During the referendum campaign, Turkey’s relations with the EU plummeted, with Erdogan describing some EU members as behaving like Nazis because they refused to allow Turkish ministers to campaign among Turkish diaspora voters.
“The pictures that emerged with Juncker and Tusk suggest a reduction of tensions and a more relaxed atmosphere,” said Semih Idiz, political columnist of the Al Monitor website. But Idiz played down any talk of any new rapprochement in relations.
“Bottom line is nether side wants to go to some kind of nasty severance of ties or divorce. There are too many issues that require cooperation. I think they will muddle through, and I think that is the message that came out. Although both sides had theirs, in terms of issues that are important, the main thing is that they are not going to escalate tensions,” said Idiz.
“We discussed the need to cooperate,” Tusk said following the meeting in a tweet.
Turkey plays its part
Monday’s suicide bombing of a pop concert in Manchester, England, served as a reminder of Turkey’s importance in countering terrorism, with a Turkish official confirming the suspected bomber had traveled through Turkey to Britain. With Turkey bordering Syria and Iraq, Europe’s security forces depend heavily on Ankara in sharing intelligence and monitoring those traveling to Europe.
The EU is also dependent on Ankara to continue to honor last March’s agreement to stem the flood of refugees and migrants into Europe. “This is perhaps one of the few and certainly important pieces of leverage Ankara has over Brussels,” said Sinan Ulgen, visiting scholar at the Carnegie Institute in Brussels. “We have been hearing from Ankara over the past few months that if the EU does not fulfill its end of the bargain and does not deliver on visa freedom, even under current circumstances Turkey will not continue with the refugee deal.”
Before leaving for Brussels, Erdogan pointedly reminded the EU of its commitments. “We don’t aim to break away from the EU, but the EU shall take its responsibilities, too. The EU cannot see Turkey [as] a beggar. It does not have such a right,” he said.
Turkey crackdown to continue
Brussels insists any visa free travel is dependent on Ankara’s narrowing of its legal definition of terrorism to harmonize it with EU law. Tens of thousands of people in Turkey have been prosecuted for terrorism offenses in a crackdown since last July’s failed coup.
But Erdogan has ruled out any letup in the crackdown, or lifting of emergency rule introduced after the coup. On Friday, Ankara’s governor, under emergency powers, issued a decree imposing a night curfew on any acts of protests, including chanting or playing music, or issuing of press statements.
Tensions with Washington could also be a factor in Ankara’s wanting to avoid a collapse in EU ties. Trump’s decision to arm Syrian Kurdish fighters, considered by Ankara as terrorists, in their fight against Islamic State has strained bilateral ties. Those strains weren’t alleviated by Erdogan’s visit this month to Washington.
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U.S. pop singer Ariana Grande says she will return to Manchester, England, to play a benefit show to raise money for the 22 victims and families of this week’s terrorist attack.
Grande had just finished her show Monday night when a suicide bomber blew himself up in the crowded lobby of the Manchester Arena. She was unharmed, although deeply shaken by the attack, and canceled her concert dates for the next two weeks.
No date has yet been set for the benefit concert, which Grande announced in a letter posted on Twitter Friday:
“Our response [to the bombing] must be to come closer together, to help each other, to love more, to sing louder, and to live more kindly and generously than we did before. I’ll be returning to the incredibly brave city of Manchester to spend some time with my fans and to have a benefit concert in honor of and to raise money for the victims and their families.”
She said she would share details of the concert as soon as they are confirmed.
Grande is expected to resume the European portion of her world tour next month, with shows in France, Portugal, Spain and Italy.
Manchester native Salman Abedi, 22, killed himself in the Manchester attack, detonating a bomb filled with nuts and bolts that he carried in a backpack. In addition to the 22 dead, at least 116 children and adults were wounded.
Many of the victims were young girls, who make up a large part of Grande’s fan base. Others were parents who had gone to arena to meet their children after the concert. The youngest victim was 8 years old.
British authorities detained eight people in connection with the attack, and Abedi’s father and a brother, who live in Tripoli, Libya, were taken into custody there. Details on how they may be tied to the bombing have not been released.
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How to stop people who are determined to kill and maim is again the focus of debate in Britain following the Manchester bombing, the worst terrorist attack in the country in more than a decade.
While visiting hospitalized children injured in the attack, Britain’s Queen Elizabeth determinedly stressed Thursday how “everyone is united” in the aftermath of the attack, dubbing the bombing “dreadful, very wicked.”
Not everyone, though, is emphasizing the importance of unity.
Allison Pearson, a columnist with Britain’s biggest-selling broadsheet, the Daily Telegraph, has maintained that the only way to prevent more jihadist killings is by rounding up and interning thousands of terror suspects “now to protect our children.”
In a tweet in the aftermath of the bombing, controversial Daily Mail columnist Katie Hopkins urged “Western men” to act.
“These are your wives. Your daughters. Your sons,” she wrote. “Stand up. Rise up. Demand action. Do not carry on as normal. Cowed.”
Hopkins, who has 730,000 followers on Twitter, also tweeted the call for a “final solution” to address Islamic terrorism. The tweet prompted London radio station LBC to fire her Friday as a talk-show host. “Final solution” was a phrase used by the Nazis to refer to their campaign to exterminate Jews during the Holocaust.
Muslims fear a rise in Islamophobia, stoked, they say, by tabloid press commentators like Hopkins.
Fear — and anger
For Britain’s Muslims — especially British-Libyans — the bombing has again raised the specter of being treated differently, of having to look over their shoulders and of being fearful about their future in a country where they were born or that gave them or their families refuge from oppression and intolerance elsewhere. They fear being treated as menacing strangers or potential terrorists in the place they call home.
On Thursday, a crowd paying tribute to the 22 people who were killed in the May 22 bombing at the Ariana Grande concert spontaneously pushed back on talk of retribution and retaliation, picking up the song “Don’t Look Back in Anger,” by the Mancunian rock band Oasis.
But there is anger, and it is being expressed on social media sites and radio talk shows, and in bars and streets, as Britain reels at the slaughter of innocents, prompting some counterterror analysts and civil libertarians to fear that another major bombing could provoke the kind of backlash Islamic State terror strategists hope to engineer.
On Facebook and other social media sites, British-Libyans have been expressing their horror at the attack and denouncing 22-year-old Salman Abedi, the suicide bomber. “Bloody fool! Why would you kill innocents? Can’t believe he was Libyan — it’s bad enough he was a Muslim!” commented a British-Libyan psychologist from the town of Loughborough in the English Midlands.
British-Libyans have also been sharing their fears about what the consequences of the bombing could be for them — especially those living in Manchester, Britain’s largest Libyan community and one of the most closely knit in the country.
“I have mixed Libyan/English heritage and have lived in Manchester my whole life,” posted Fatima Derbi. “I am completely sickened by this!! Unfortunately this may have a negative impact on the 25,000 Libyans living in this city.”
Threats and slurs
Mohamed Shaban, who was born in the Libyan capital, Tripoli, but brought up in London and is now a legal adviser, worries that Abedi will be seen by many Britons as somehow representative of British-Libyans.
“Libyans in the U.K. come in different shades,” Shaban said. “There are those who have excelled in their fields, in medicine, science, law and commerce. Others invest their time and money in charity work, while others have made it as professional footballers at elite English clubs. Unfortunately, one or two have lost their way, and the tragedy is that this abysmal excuse of a human being who mass murdered children at a concert is going to be misdescribed as a representative of all Libyans in the U.K. Sad on so many levels.”
Some Muslims say they are already on the receiving end of threats and slurs. “People will retaliate obviously,” a Manchester Muslim told British broadcaster Channel Four News, adding, “There is a risk. It’s all about ignorance, all about awareness; we need to make sure people are aware of what Islam is really about, because that’s not what our Islam teaches us.”
Some British-Libyans say the onus is on them to be more outspoken in condemnation and much more proactive to argue against those in their own community who are determined to fan the flames of hatred.
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The U.S. economy expanded at a slightly faster pace than first estimated during the first quarter of this year.
The Commerce Department’s Friday report shows expansion at a 1.2 percent annual rate in January, February and March. That is nearly twice as fast as the preliminary estimate, but slower than the end of last year, and much more slowly than the 3 percent rate of expansion that the Trump administration says it will achieve.
Officials routinely revise growth estimates as more complete data becomes available.
Many experts say the economy is growing slowly because aging baby boomers are leaving the work force to retire, and productivity growth has been disappointingly slow.
The chief economist of PNC Bank, Gus Faucher, says growth is “bouncing back” in the second quarter. Faucher says he expects the U.S. economic growth will bounce around somewhat and expand at a 2.3 percent rate this year. Faucher also expects the growth rate to be about the same next year.
A separate report shows new orders for manufactured goods declined in April. The seven-tenths of a percent decrease followed several months of gains.
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Africa loses an estimated $50 billion a year to illicit financial flows, leaving governments strapped for cash and dependent on development aid.
The continent is “hemorrhaging” money because of the failure of countries to enact strong legislation to check money flows, says Rose Acha, Cameroon’s supreme state audit minister and secretary general of the African Organization of Supreme Audit Institutions.
Instead, uncontrolled transactions are common.
“Whatever the source of your money, we don’t know, but we welcome those who want to deposit money,” said Faison Winifred of Investment Fund, a local financial institution in Cameroon’s capital, Yaounde. “Why … do you discourage the person by asking where is your source of income? We encourage everybody who comes to deposit money. … There is no limit. Whatever amount you want to deposit, we like it.”
Acha says smuggling and trafficking during illegal commercial activity constitute 65 percent of Africa’s financial hemorrhage, while criminal activities — which consist of using funds for illegal purposes, like financing organized crime and terrorism — come next with 30 percent. She says corruption and tax evasion account for the remaining 5 percent of the money lost.
According to the United Nations High Level Panel on Illicit Financial Flows, Africa loses a staggering $50 billion annually. The panel says that is approximately double the amount of official development assistance Africa receives.
African tax and audit experts, meeting this week in Yaounde, said the worst offender is Nigeria, with an illicit outflow of $157 billion from 2003 to 2012. South Africa ranks second with $122 billion lost during that time period, and Egypt third with $37 billion.
Magagi Tanko of the supreme state audit office of Niger says that in Central and West Africa, huge sums of money are transferred illegally and public coffers are impoverished. In addition, illegal financial flows from drug trafficking have spiraled.
Exporters use under-invoicing so they can dodge taxes and bring in less foreign exchange, leaving the rest of their earnings in offshore accounts, he says.
Lagan Wort, executive secretary of the African Tax Administration, says a regional approach is key.
“Parts of the defense mechanism that African governments must employ is to build strong tax legislation and tax policy systems, including tax agreements between countries, especially inter-African countries,” Wort said.
The experts resolved to work with the Stolen Assets Recovery Initiative — a joint effort by the World Bank and U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime — to recover funds, but said the process is long and cumbersome, since many banks remain secretive about their transactions.
They said many of the illicit financial flows also end up funneled through complex criminal rings, severely limiting the ability of law enforcement and tax authorities to trace offenders and eventually recover the money.
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Turkish security forces killed 29 Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) militants in an operation in a mountainous area of eastern Turkey’s Agri and Van provinces, the Agri governor’s office said Friday.
Turkey’s army said Thursday three Turkish soldiers and a member of the state-sponsored village guard militia had been killed in the operation, launched in the Tendurek mountain area along the border of the two provinces, near the Iranian border.
A ceasefire between the Turkish state and the militants broke down in July 2015 and the southeast subsequently saw some of the worst violence since the PKK insurgency began in 1984.
More than 40,000 people, mostly Kurds, have been killed in the conflict. The PKK is designated a terrorist group by Turkey, the United States and the European Union.
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On his first NATO summit as U.S. president, Donald Trump lectured NATO leaders for spending what he sees as insufficient money on defense, and said the group should be more focused on terrorism. The president’s remarks came Thursday at a meeting of European leaders in Brussels, as VOA’s Steve Herman reports.
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A budget proposal by the Trump administration in March outlines a commitment to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) effort to send astronauts to Mars. About $3.7 billion is earmarked for development of the Space Launch System and the Orion capsule, crucial parts of NASA’s effort to send humans deeper into space. VOA’s Kane Farabaugh explores the effort of contractors working on the project, united by the commitment to “boldly go” further into the final frontier.
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NATO has moved into brand new, shiny headquarters – projecting a modern, forward looking image that counters the characterization that President Trump and other critics of the alliance have previously made of the organization. Amid the anxiety felt by some European leaders about the future, some see Thursday’s summit – where discussions were driven largely by the latest spate of terrorist attacks in Europe – as a possibility for a new direction for the alliance. VOA’s Luis Ramirez reports.
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Soon there will be no classic beauty salons in the United States. At least that’s what two Alexandria businessmen claim. Don and Jeff DeBolt, father and son, offer stylists an opportunity to become owners of “one man salons” by renting equipped salon studios. The prices start at three hundred dollars per week. Their experiment turned out to be a successful business. Today there are 300 Sola Salon Studios with over seven thousand professionals. Anush Avetisyan visited one of them.
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While world attention has focused on Kim Jong Un’s recent missile tests, a monthlong surge in gasoline prices in Pyongyang is showing no signs of letting up, a puzzling problem that if allowed to drag on could be bad news for the North Korean economy.
Prices have shot up to about $2.30 per kilogram, or about $6.44 a gallon, since mid-April, when prices were in the $1.25-30 range. That means North Korea now has some of the highest prices in the world for gasoline. For comparison, the price in April last year was about 80 cents per kilogram.
The cause and extent of the surge remains a mystery.
Traffic unaffected
Officially, there has been no comment. There’s no obvious sign of less traffic on the streets, at least in Pyongyang, which is more affluent and developed than other North Korean cities. Taxis appear to be operating normally and have not raised their fares.
The North’s by now pervasive market economy, which is tolerated by the ruling regime in exchange for its cut of the profits, has made fuel and the ability to transport goods and people so essential that demand for gasoline is not so sensitive to price.
But many gas stations around the capital, if they are selling fuel at all, have been limiting who they sell it to and how much each customer can buy. The long queues and mad dashes to fill gas tanks and large plastic storage cans that marked the beginning days of the surge appear to have subsided, though stations’ operations remain irregular and unpredictable.
North Korean gas stations generally belong to chains associated with large government enterprises or sometimes the military. Gas is also sold through more informal channels, including street-side stalls and the black market. It is sold by weight in North Korea, thus the “per kilogram” rates.
What’s behind this?
Without official confirmation or data, it’s hard to conclusively say what is happening. Prices also tend to fluctuate from station to station.
Several possible scenarios could be in play.
It was rumored last month that China had or was about to limit exports. That possibility, hinted at in a tabloid newspaper associated with China’s ruling party, could have set off the surge either because of an actual drop in supply or speculative buying in anticipation of a shortfall.
The incentive to hoard remains because of rumors Beijing will implement sanctions if Pyongyang conducts a nuclear test. It is unclear how informed North Koreans are about the possibility of another test soon, but satellite imagery widely reported abroad suggests one could come at any time.
The North Korean government itself might have pulled some of supply out of the market.
Pyongyang has been known to divert fuel to higher-priority uses, such as major construction projects or high-profile political events. Gas prices can also rise in tandem with the farming cycle, when more fuel is needed for tractors and pumps. All three could apply right now. North Korea completed construction of a major high-rise residential area in the capital and held a lavish celebration and military parade last month. This is also spring planting season.
The most ominous possibility is that the regime is preparing for some sort of emergency.
But there does not seem to be any strong evidence of that or of Chinese action to cut off supplies.
William Brown, an adjunct professor at Georgetown University and non-resident fellow at the Korea Economic Institute of America, said rumor-inspired hoarding is the likely culprit.
Sensitivity to sanctions
It’s unclear if prices are also rising for diesel and kerosene, used to heat and keep the lights on in city apartments and machinery working in the fields.
An acute sensitivity to even the hint of Chinese sanctions, if that is behind the surge, would be telling.
The Soviet Union supplied crude oil to North Korea in the 1950s through the 1980s. China joined in early 1970s and now provides virtually all of the North’s supply. Brown said that includes a 50,000-ton delivery monthly via an 18-kilometer (11-mile) cross-border pipeline that is worth about $20 million at current Chinese export prices.
Beijing doesn’t require the North to pay and hasn’t included those shipments in official trade figures since 2014.
If Pyongyang had to start paying for that 50,000-ton freebie, the profit from sales of what it refines domestically would drop and it would have less money to spend on other things. The resulting scarcity of dollars would hurt the value of North Korea’s currency, leading to inflation.
In any case, Brown said, the volatility of gasoline prices underscores the North’s dependence on markets that have expanded dramatically since Kim Jong Un took power more than five years ago. The rise of markets has led to better productivity and use of scarce goods, like gasoline, helping economic growth.
But, he added, it is at the same time “the bane of a socialist government.”
“Real money in private pockets, after all, is power,” he said.
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OPEC and other oil nations meeting Thursday appeared set to extend their production cuts in an effort to shore up prices. But the intended impact could be short-lived.
That’s due to U.S. shale producers. With crude prices above $50 a barrel from lows of last year, they are increasingly moving back into the market. Their output already is partially offsetting the cuts, and even more U.S. companies are poised to return if prices rise further.
The upshot is that the price of oil — and derived products like fuel — is unlikely to increase much in coming months, analysts say. That will be welcome news to consumers and energy-hungry businesses worldwide but could continue to strain the budgets of some of the more economically-troubled oil-producing nations, like Venezuela and Brazil.
The latest reductions have been in effect since November, when the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries agreed to cut production by 1.2 million barrels a day. Non-OPEC countries led by Russia chipped in with a further 600,000-barrel reduction.
Ahead of the meeting, the organization announced that Equatorial Guinea had joined, expanding OPEC membership to 14.
With the deal due to expire at the end of June, OPEC oil ministers appeared ready to prolong it up to nine months even before they sat down to make a formal decision.
Saudi Oil Minister Khalid A. al-Falih spoke of a “9-month straight” extension going into Thursday’s meeting. Iran’s Bijan Namdar Zanganeh floated possible extensions of three months, six months or even a year and said his country had “no difficulty” with any of the options, while Jabbar Ali Hussein al-Luiebi, his Iraqi counterpart, mentioned “the scenario of a nine-month freeze.”
Al-Falih said that the cuts had achieved a key aim. “Inventories are drawing down,” he told reporters.
But even with the reductions, oil prices have risen less than OPEC hoped for from last year’s levels. At over $50 a barrel, benchmark crude sits substantially below the highs reached in 2014, but is priced high enough to bring back into the market U.S. producers who eased back as prices tumbled last year. U.S. shale production requires a higher price to be profitable.
U.S. output since last year has increased by nearly a million barrels a day to a daily 9 million barrels. That already puts American producers in the league with oil giants Saudi Arabia and Russia and cuts further into OPEC’s past ability to play a role in setting prices and supplies.
More than 400 oil rigs are now working U.S. shale fields — an increase of more than 120 percent compared with a year ago. And U.S. producers are poised to expand more, even if prices tick upward only moderately as a result of an oil-cut extension by OPEC and its partners.
Commerzbank cited data from the U.S. Department of Energy saying U.S. production was roughly 540,000 barrels per day higher in mid-May than at the start of the year.
“This offsets nearly half of OPEC’s production cuts,” it noted.
Even a decision to maintain oil cuts thus is likely to only kick the can down the road from Thursday’s meeting until OPEC ministers convene again late this year. Crude prices are unlikely to rise substantially — and that means the era of windfall profits appears to be over for member nations, at least for now.
While analysts at research firm IHS Markit expect OPEC revenues to rise modestly this year after dropping from their peak of $1.2 trillion in 2012, “the total will be less than half the level of 2012, when prices were more than double current levels.”
British counter-terror officers have been conducting raids and making arrests in the wake of the concert bombing earlier this week that killed 22 people, including children. The raids are reassuring on the one hand, showing the police are moving fast. But they are adding also to a sense of alarm among Manchester residents.
That alarm is slowly morphing into anger as it has emerged British security services missed several opportunities to identify the Manchester suicide bomber, 22-year-old Salman Abedi, as a high-risk militant. Several people have stepped forward — from neighbors to mosque leaders and community workers — to complain about the lack of action by authorities after they reported their worries about him to counter-terror officials.
One community worker says he contacted authorities after Abedi said “being a suicide bomber was OK.”
Another community leader, Mohammed Shafiq, chief executive of the Ramadhan Foundation, told the Daily Telegraph newspaper: “People in the community expressed concerns about the way this man was behaving and reported it in the right way using the right channels. They did not hear anything since.”
Neither Britain’s domestic intelligence service MI5 nor the Manchester police have responded to the claims, but they are likely to be taken up by lawmakers demanding to know why Abedi was seen just as a peripheral figure rather than a threat requiring surveillance and investigation.
British authorities are focusing also on the international connections of the Manchester suicide bomber, who was born in Britain to Libyan parents after they fled to Britain in 1980 to escape the regime of Col. Moammar Gadhafi.
Libya trip
Abedi travelled back to Manchester last week from Libya after visiting his mother, father, younger brother and a sister, who moved full-time to Libya after Gadhafi’s overthrow. His father, Ramadan, was at one time a member of the anti-Gadhafi Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, or LIFG, a militant Islamist band that was invited to join al Qaida by Osama bin Laden when its leaders were based in Afghanistan. Western media have taken to describing LIFG as an “al Qaida subsidiary” — a description rejected by former senior leaders, who say they declined bin Laden’s invitation. LIFG subsequently split with some members joining al Qaida.
The whereabouts of Ramadan are currently unknown. On Wednesday night masked gunmen detained him while he was responding to media phone calls. Salman’s younger brother, 20-year-old Hashem was also detained Wednesday night, by an Islamist militia in Tripoli known as the Rada Special Deterrence Force.
A spokesman for the 700-strong militia, a self-appointed vigilante force that has a fearsome reputation for harshness, said Rada had been monitoring Hashem for more than a month on suspicion he had ties with the Islamic State terror group, which has a powerful affiliate in Libya.
In a statement Wednesday, the militia said Hashem had confessed to IS membership, saying his brother, Salman, was a member, too. The militia claimed Hashem admitted he knew in advance about the plans for the Manchester bombing.
But a spokesman for Libyan authorities in Tripoli had a different version, telling British news media Hashem “felt there was something going on there in Manchester and he thought his brother would do something like bombing or attack. So after that, he told us, ‘Having internet, I see the attack in Manchester and I knew that’s my brother.’”
Link to Manchester
A strong Libyan connection to the Manchester bombing is a troubling prospect — not only for the British security services but for their counterparts elsewhere in Europe. If the Manchester bombing was directed by Islamic State’s Libyan affiliate, it would be the first time the group had managed to pull off a terrorist act in Europe using the North African state.
And it raises the possibility of more jihadists with Libyan connections and British passports bringing their fight to Britain and Europe, complicating the challenge European intelligence services already face with hundreds of European-born jihadist returnees from Syria.
But an Italian security official who’s been working on Libyan issues told VOA the government in Rome remains wary of some post-bombing claims being made by the warring parties in Libya, seeing them as agenda-pushing. Midweek the prime minister of one of the rival governments in the country, Abdullah Thinni, who heads a government based in Beida, eastern Libya, said he’d warned the British government it was harboring Libyan terrorists and sought to link the bombing to the Muslim Brotherhood.
No connection so far has been found to the Muslim Brotherhood, say British intelligence officials.
The Libyan connection to the bombing will likely have a major impact on European Union policy-making when it comes to the migrant flow into Europe from Libya. The interior ministers of German and Italy have been urging the EU to set up a mission along Libya’s border with Niger in a bid to stop mainly African migrants from reaching Europe. Italian as well as other European authorities have long worried about jihadists infiltrating southern Europe as migrants, seeding themselves among thousands of sub-Saharan Africans making the Mediterranean crossing from Libya.But there is resistance from some EU member countries to the Italian-German recommendation.
Barack Obama received a rock-star welcome in Berlin as he appeared at a public debate Thursday with Chancellor Angela Merkel, whom he praised as one of his “favorite partners” during his presidency.
Security was tight in front of the German capital’s iconic Brandenburg Gate, where Obama and Merkel appeared on a podium before thousands of people attending a gathering marking the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation. Police helicopters patrolled the skies and snipers with balaclavas watched the scene from nearby rooftops.
After lauding Merkel as someone who had done “outstanding work,” Obama launched a defense of his own presidency and the values of liberal democracy championed by both leaders.
Citing the rise of nationalism and xenophobia in parts of the world, Obama told the crowd that “we have to push back against those trends that would violate human rights or suppress democracy or restrict individual freedoms.”
In a veiled reference to his successor Donald Trump, Obama also spoke of the need to see development aid and diplomacy as essential aspects of national security policy.
“We can’t isolate ourselves. We can’t hide behind a wall,” he said, to cheers from the audience.
Merkel, who hosted Obama at the same spot four years ago, was due to travel to Brussels later Thursday for a meeting with leaders of fellow NATO member states, including President Trump.
Thursday’s appearance with Obama was criticized by some German opposition politicians as a publicity stunt ahead of September’s general election, in which Merkel aims to win a fourth term.
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A brother and father of the alleged Manchester suicide bomber have been arrested in Libya, according to a spokesman for the country’s anti-terror force.
Security spokesman Ahmed bin Salem said alleged bomber Salman Abedi’s younger brother, Hashim, was arrested in Tripoli Tuesday.
Bin Salem told the Reuters news agency the two brothers had been in contact recently, and Hashim knew of the attack plans.
“We have evidence that he is involved in Daesh (Islamic State) with his brother. We have been following him for more than one month and a half,” he said.
The alleged bomber, Abedi, was born in England to Libyan parents. His father, who lives in Tripoli, has also been detained.
British police said Wednesday it was “clear” the suicide bomber who attacked the Ariana Grande concert in Manchester did not act alone.
“It’s very clear that this is a network that we are investigating,” Manchester Chief Constable Ian Hopkins said during a news conference.
5 arrested
British police have arrested five people in connection with the attack, so far, as they continue to conduct armed raids throughout Manchester.
Greater Manchester Police said the fifth suspect was detained Wednesday evening in Wigan, a town to the west of Manchester.
Officers also arrested three men earlier Wednesday after executing warrants in South Manchester. There was no information about how the five men might be involved in the attack.
British interior minister Amber Rudd said Wednesday the alleged suicide bomber, Abedi, was “known” by British intelligence services before the bombing.
The blast at the conclusion of the concert at Manchester Arena killed 22 people and wounded 59 others. The attacker also died at the site.
Tracking Abedi’s last days
Investigators are now trying to figure out what Abedi was up to in his last days before the attack Monday.
French Interior Minister Gerard Collomb told BFM television on Wednesday that British and French intelligence have information that Abedi had likely traveled to Syria.
According to Collomb, Abedi “grew up in Britain and then suddenly, after a trip to Libya and then likely to Syria, became radicalized and decided to carry out this attack.”
“In any case, the links with Daesh (Islamic State) are proven,” he said.
Islamic State is claiming it was behind the attack, but neither British nor U.S. intelligence have confirmed that.
Terror level raised
Britain raised its terrorism alert level to critical – the highest step – after the blast, signaling that another attack was highly likely and could be imminent.
The change is most visible in the deployment of soldiers to help guard certain areas, including major events such as concerts and football matches, in order to free up police officers.
Hopkins said an off-duty police officer was among those killed in the suicide attack, but it will take up to five days for authorities to identify all the victims.
“Due to number of victims the Home Office post-mortems are likely to take four to five days. After this we will be in a position to formerly name the victims,” he said. “We have spoken to all of the families of those who lay injured in our hospitals.”
British Prime Minister Theresa May said in an address to the nation late Tuesday that authorities will do everything possible to protect the public and asked people to remain vigilant.
Many of the victims of the blast were young girls, with the youngest identified so far being just 8-year-old.
Video from the arena showed the joy in the audience at the end of the concert turning to confusion and then to panic and a scramble to get out of the building as the realization of what just happened spread.
Witness say they saw blood covered bodies on the floor while others, badly wounded, staggered toward the exits of the building.
The scene outside the concert hall was also chaotic, with traffic snarled and parents rushing to the scene.
Britain’s Queen Elizabeth held a moment of silence at a garden party at Buckingham Palace. French President Emmanuel Macron signed a condolence book at the British embassy in Paris. German Chancellor Angela Merkel said the attack only strengthens Germany’s resolve to work with the British.
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Moody’s Investors Service downgraded China’s credit rating Wednesday – from Aa3 (Double A-3) to A1 – saying it expects China’s economy to erode in coming years as growth slows and its debt burden continues to rise. The downgrade comes as the government faces new financial challenges after years of credit-fueled stimulus.
Craig Erlam, senior market analyst at foreign exchange firm Oanda, said the credit downgrade comes as no surprise. “Because talk of Chinese debt and concerns about the size of Chinese debt has been going on for the last few years. They seem to be very reliant on these high levels of growth, which has been slowing,” according to Erlam.
China’s economy, the second largest in the world, grew 6.7 percent in 2016, down from 6.9 percent the previous year, the slowest pace since 1990. Erlam says the next few years could be challenging.
“They’ve [the Chinese government] talked about wanting to move away from an investment and export-led economy and focus more on domestic consumption and look at a more sustainable model. But, as we’ve seen over the last couple of years, as soon as it runs into any difficulties – it seems to revert back to where it was a couple of years ago and start spending more money on infrastructure.”
Moody’s expects the government’s direct debt burden to rise to 40 percent of GDP by 2018 and closer to 45 percent by the end of the decade. That’s still well below the 60 percent debt to GDP warning line for the European Union.
China’s Finance Ministry said the downgrade overestimates the risks of rising debt and claims it was based on “inappropriate methodology.” The downgrade is likely to increase the cost of borrowing, but analysts say the one-notch downgrade remains comfortably within the investment grade rating range.
Triple A is the highest rating for creditworthiness, followed by Double A, then Single A. C represents the weakest creditworthiness and means default is imminent.
China’s Shanghai Composite Index fell more than 1 percent after the credit downgrade while the value of the yuan slipped briefly 0.1 percent against the U.S. dollar.
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U.S. congressional panels are issuing new subpoenas to Michael Flynn, in an effort to force him to turn over documents and testify about his brief tenure as President Donald Trump’s first national security adviser.
Flynn rebuffed the Senate Intelligence Committee earlier this week, refusing to hand over information it had requested about the 24 days he held the key White House post in the first weeks of the Trump administration. Trump fired him for lying to Vice President Mike Pence about his contacts with Russia’s ambassador to the United States in the weeks before Trump assumed power.
But the Senate intelligence panel, and its counterpart in the House of Representatives, say they are they are issuing new subpoenas to Flynn. He is a retired Army general who was one of Trump’s key political surrogates on the campaign trail last year.
“We initially requested his voluntary participation,” Representative Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House panel, told reporters Wednesday. “He declined. We are going to be subpoenaing him.”
In refusing to turn over documents to the Senate panel, Flynn invoked his U.S. Constitution Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. Legal experts say that if he handed over the information to congressional investigators he would risk not being able to claim the same privilege and refuse to testify before congressional panels investigating how Russia meddled in last year’s U.S. election and possible collusion between Trump campaign aides and Russian officials to help Trump win.
One lawmaker, Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy, told CNN, “I think he’s going to have to tell his story.”
Another senator, Susan Collins of Maine, told VOA, the Senate panel issued a new subpoena for Flynn’s business records.
“It is dubious that a Fifth Amendment claim can be attached to a request for business records, and that is one reason we are pursuing that route,” she said.
Collins said the business records “may indicate payments from the Russian government or affiliated entities. They may indicate meetings that were held. We just don’t know. That’s why we want to examine them.”
Flynn was paid more than $30,000 in recent years to attend Moscow events, including a 2015 dinner celebrating the Kremlin-backed RT television network where he sat next to Russian President Vladimir Putin, and more than $500,000 to represent Turkish interests in the United States. The Defense Department’s inspector general is investigating whether Flynn sought permission to receive the payments after being specifically warned when he retired from the military to not accept money from foreign governments.
While the congressional panels conduct their probes, Robert Mueller, a former director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the country’s top investigative agency, was named last week to head a criminal investigation about possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Moscow.
Trump has been dismissive of the various investigations, contending they are a “witch hunt” promoted by opposition Democrats as an excuse to explain his upset of Hillary Clinton.
Russia’s aging Communist Party is attempting to attract new, young members by using pop culture and addressing their growing concerns over alleged corruption and income inequality.
Russia’s Communist Party, a successor from the Soviet Union’s, is celebrating 95 years in May since the founding of its youth Pioneers movement.
On Moscow’s Red Square Sunday, young Communist Party members wearing red hats and bandannas waved flags, while others danced to traditional songs; some were indoctrinated into the Leninist Young Communist League of Russia, known as the Komsomol.
Aging leaders of the party laid flowers at the tomb of their founder, Vladimir Lenin. But they insist the Communist Party is far from dying.
“An entire group has today joined the Komsomol,” said Chairman of Russia’s Communist Party Gennady Zyuganov. “These are guys who we made Pioneers some time ago. And recently 60,000 people of the younger generation have become party members. The organization lives and progresses.”
But the Communist Party, like its 73-year-old chairman, is getting old.
“The statement that the Communist Party is a ‘party of pensioners’ is quite correct, but just partly,” said Communist Party member and artist Igor Petrygin-Rodionov. “Because a change of generations is going on, and the older generation is leaving — though struggling and quite reluctantly.”
Looking for youth
Petrygin-Rodionov was enlisted by the party to try to attract younger members by using images from popular and Western culture. At his Saint Petersburg studio, a promotional poster depicts Lenin using a Communist Party laptop with the slogan “The Second Century is Online.”
At a weekend exhibit at Saint Petersburg’s University of Technology Management and Economics, Petrygin-Rodionov displays some of his most well-known posters. One revamps the famous image of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin smoking a pipe by replacing it with an electronic cigarette. Another shows communism’s founding father, Karl Marx, wearing a leather jacket and jeans with the Arnold Schwarzenegger slogan, from the film Terminator, “I’ll Be Back.”
But selling communism to Russia’s modern youth is no small challenge.
“One can’t say that communism was either bad or good,” said a student attending the exhibit who gave only his first name, Gena. “It is impossible to go back to communism, like it is impossible to go back in time or to push the toothpaste back into the tube.”
Concerns about corruption and growing inequality are rallying some young Russians, but not necessarily to their grandparent’s communist party.
New idea of communism
“There is no communism yet,” said the leader of the Moscow Duma faction of the Communist Party, Andrey Klychkov. “There is no communism in China either. When we ask what Chinese socialism is and why private property rights, enrichment opportunities are present there, the Chinese say, ‘That it is a least-evil measure for the construction of communism, when we reach it, we won’t have it.’ That’s why we are talking today about a different approach.”
Klychkov was speaking at a protest rally against a plan by Russian authorities to demolish up to 8,000 Soviet-era buildings in Moscow and relocate more than a million residents. The plan has raised suspicions of corruption and sparked demonstrations, including by the Communist Party.
“Today the main strategy is in giving the young people an opportunity to implement their ideas,” said Klychkov. “Not everybody accepts the reproduction of the Soviet past. But the ideas of socialism and social justice, as well as positive attitudes to the Soviet past, start prevailing among many young people, as social studies show.”
New leadership
To re-energize the party, Russia’s communists may for the first time in 24 years elect a new leader at the party’s congress this week. Zyuganov has led the party since it was allowed to be reconstituted in 1993, after being banned with the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
Klychkov, the party’s candidate for the 2018 Moscow mayor election, is one possibility.
“… it’s not a question of me replacing him,” said Klychkov. “The question of electing the party leader is for the party congress. And the congress will take a decision in the near future on May 26 or 27.”
Regardless of any next generation leadership, few expect the once revolutionary party of Vladimir Lenin to pose a real challenge to Russia’s ruling elite.
Although its leaders deny being part of a so-called “systemic opposition,” the Communist Party has supported the Kremlin on most domestic policies and almost all foreign ones.
VOA’s Ricardo Marquina Montanana and Olga Pavlova contributed to this report.
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According to a recent analysis, in about 15 years, depending on the country, up to 38 percent of jobs performed by humans may be turned over to robots. Experts who gathered last week at a robotic expo in Paris say we have to prepare for the new reality if we want to avoid disruptive social changes. VOA’s George Putic reports.
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Rihanna Hardy had been excited about seeing Ariana Grande ever since she got her concert ticket as a Christmas gift. So when the day came, the 11-year-old left school a couple of hours early to make sure to get to Manchester Arena on time.
Her parents, Ryan and Shauna, took the afternoon off work, and the family drove the 225 kilometers (140 miles) from Newcastle to Manchester. They struggled to find the arena’s multistory parking lot, and barely managed to buy Rihanna a black Ariana Grande tour sweatshirt before the concert started.
But what was supposed to be a special night for Rihanna and thousands of other young concertgoers turned into a tragedy when a suicide bomb blasted off just outside the cavernous hall. It killed 22 people, including an 8-year-old girl, and injured 59 — the deadliest attack in Britain in more than a decade.
“Poor Rihanna … just kept asking every five or 10 seconds, ‘Are we going to die?’ Those were her exact words,” her father said.
The family took their seats, close to the stage, just before the first of two supporting acts warmed up the crowd. The arena, which seats 21,000, was packed. Many clutched pink balloons and donned cat ears, like those the 23-year-old Grande is famous for wearing.
As the former star of the Nickelodeon series “Victorious” sang and danced her way through her set, the arena heated up. Young children and their parents glistened with sweat.
Then, as the concert ended, the horror began.
Just a few minutes after Grande finished her final song, “Dangerous Woman,” blew a kiss to the audience and left the stage, the house lights came back on. People began filing toward the exits.
It was then that a suspect identified as 22-year-old Salman Abedi set off his suicide bomb in the foyer, near a road linking the venue to the city’s railway station. Witnesses described seeing bolts and other bits of metal at the scene of the blast.
The boom echoed through Manchester Arena, shaking the floor with a hollow thud. Thousands of Ariana Grande fans — many of them youngsters accompanied by their parents — fell silent for a few seconds, in shock. Then the screaming started.
“I thought we were going to die. It was just horrendous,” said Rihanna’s mother.
Panic descended on the hall.
“It was just sheer chaos,” said Kirstyn Pollard, who had a seat close to the stage. “People were trying to get off the balconies. It was awful.”
Melissa Andre and two friends clambered over a security barrier in their rush to get out. It was already dented from other concertgoers fleeing the arena, as officials tried frantically to restore order.
“A security official was on stage saying ‘Be calm, everything’s fine,’ ” said Andre, 20. “I think they were just saying that to calm people down before they got out. And then when we got out, the alarm went off.”
Police were called in at 10:33 p.m. As they arrived, a smell hung in the air — a bit like smoke, a bit like burning, nothing the Ryans had ever smelled before.
“I can’t describe it. It was a really awful smell,” Shauna Hardy said. “And there was just alarms going off, police everywhere. Sirens everywhere. People running, screaming. It was just crazy. Absolutely crazy.”
Ryan Hardy desperately tried to slow down his wife and daughter as they left the arena, worried they might fall in the crush of people fleeing the carnage. They emerged from the stifling heat of the concert hall into the cool night.
“Everyone else was running out the entrance while he was walking out the entrance,” Rihanna — still wearing her Ariana Grande sweatshirt — said Tuesday, looking up proudly at her dad.
Police and paramedics rushed to aid the wounded, wrapping some in foil blankets to keep them warm and ward off shock. Others hobbled off into the night, their clothes torn and stained by blood.
Charlotte Fairclough, 14, was part of the rush to flee.
“Everyone was like scrambling over each other,” she said. “Quite a few people got knocked over. It was like just a race to get out.”
When Charlotte got out, she immediately called her mom, Stacy, who was waiting to pick up her daughter and a friend. The she called again to say she’d heard a big bang.
Her mother, at the time, wasn’t too worried.
“I’d heard fireworks earlier in the night, so I wasn’t too concerned to start with,” she said.
The full scale of the attack did not hit home until they turned on the news at a hotel.
The Hardy family escaped unscathed, but the shock of the night endured even as they tried to sleep it off. When a door slammed loudly at half past five in the morning, Rihanna got frightened.
“There are a lot of people killed, a lot of people injured, a lot of people missing,” Shauna Hardy said. “And we just feel so so lucky that we are all together.”
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Ariana Grande returned to the United States on Tuesday, one day after a suicide bomber killed 22 people at the singer’s concert in Manchester, England, as questions lingered over whether she would continue her European tour.
Grande, 23, was seen in photographs posted by Britain’s Daily Mail newspaper walking down the steps of a private plane at an airport in her hometown of Boca Raton, Florida, and being met by family members.
The Daily Mail images showed the diminutive pop star dressed casually in sweats and appearing downcast as she greeted her boyfriend, the rapper Mac Miller, on the tarmac.
Grande had not been seen publicly since an explosion ripped through the packed Manchester Arena at the end of her performance there. Some of the 22 people who died in the attack were teens or young girls. Grande was apparently unharmed.
British police have identified the man suspected of carrying out the massacre as 22-year-old Salman Abedi, who was born in Manchester to parents of Libyan origin. Islamic State claimed responsibility for what it called revenge against “Crusaders,” but there appeared to be contradictions in its account of the operation.
In her only statement so far, Grande took to Twitter some five hours after the bombing to describe herself as “broken” in the aftermath of the attack.
“from the bottom of my heart, i am so so sorry. i don’t have words,” she said in the tweet.
Grande was performing in Manchester during the European leg of a tour to promote her third album, “Dangerous Woman,” which also has her scheduled to visit London, Belgium, Poland, Germany and Switzerland in the coming weeks.
Despite speculation that she would cancel the rest of the tour, no formal announcement had been made as of Tuesday. Grande’s manager, Scooter Braun, did not respond to requests for comment by Reuters.
“We mourn the lives of children and loved ones taken by this cowardly act,” Braun said in a statement posted on Twitter on Monday evening. “We ask all of you to hold the victims, heir families and all those affected in your hearts and prayers.”
Grande, a native of Boca Raton, starred in the Broadway musical “13” and on the Nickelodeon TV series “Victorious” before releasing her solo debut album, “Yours Truly.”
Best known for her singles “Problem” and “Break Free,” Grande is credited with having an exceptionally broad vocal range for a pop star.
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The suspected suicide bomber who killed 22 people at a concert in Manchester, northern England, on Monday has been identified as 22-year-old Salman Abedi, British police said.
Abedi was born in Manchester in 1994 to parents of Libyan birth, U.S. security officials said, citing British intelligence officials. Prime Minister Theresa May confirmed Abedi was born and brought up in Britain.
His parents emigrated from Libya to London before moving to the Fallowfield area of south Manchester, where they have lived for at least 10 years, the U.S. officials said. Police raided a house in Elsmore Road in Fallowfield earlier on Tuesday.
A U.S. government source said investigators were looking into whether Abedi had traveled to Libya and whether he had been in touch with Islamic State militants there. The Times newspaper said Abedi was believed to have returned to Britain from Libya recently.
The University of Salford, based in Manchester, said in a statement that Abedi was one of its students and it was helping the police with their investigation.
Police arrest man
A 23-year-old man arrested by police in a separate move in south Manchester in connection with the attack on Tuesday was believed to be Abedi’s brother, news reports said.
Abedi had a sister named Jomana Abedi, the U.S. security officials said.
Abdalla Yousef, a spokesman for the Didsbury Mosque in Manchester, said Abedi’s father and brother had prayed there but Abedi had worshipped at another mosque.
“I have managed to track down somebody who knows the family. He confirmed his father and sister and the rest of the family had moved to Libya and had moved there straight after the revolution after Gadaffi was killed,” Yousef said.
He said it was possible the brothers had traveled between the two countries since then.
A trustee of the mosque, Fawzi Haffar, said Abedi’s father was currently in Libya and had been there for a while.
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The U.S. government has filed a civil lawsuit against automaker Fiat Chrysler, saying the company has used illegal software to fake emission results on its diesel vehicles.
The civil complaint filed Tuesday follows initial accusations from the Environmental Protection Agency released in January.
The software reportedly hid emissions of nitrogen oxide, allowing the vehicles to appear to comply with regulations set forth in the Clean Air Act, while still emitting more of the gas than is allowed.
At issue are the 2014 to 2016 models of Grand Cherokees and Dodge Ram 1500 pickup trucks with three-liter diesel engines sold in the United States, around 104,000 vehicles in total, the EPA said.
In 2015, Volkswagen was caught using a similar device to cheat emissions standards. Volkwagen, however, admitted to having cheated, while Fiat Chrysler denies wrongdoing. The VW scandal eventually led to approximately $20 billion worth of fines levied against the company and indictments of seven company executives.
Fiat Chrysler did not immediately comment Tuesday, but its shares fell 2.9 percent.
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U.S. President Donald Trump is proposing major changes in the way Washington’s $4.1 trillion budget is spent, with more money for the military, border security, and veterans. The just-published budget for next year also slashes money for programs that benefit the poor.
Trump’s top budget official Mick Mulvaney says for the first time the budget looks at spending from the point of view of the taxpayers, rather than the people who get government help.
The director of the Office of Management and Budget says the budget translates Trump’s campaign promises and priorities into practical plans. Mulvaney says the approach will balance the budget in 10 years, and boost economic growth to three percent.
Former U.S. Treasury Secretary and World Bank Economist Larry Summers, calls the budget’s economic assumptions “ludicrously optimistic.” In an opinion article in the Washington Post he says the impact on low income Americans will be “dire.”
A president’s budget has to be approved by Congress, so the final form may be quite different from what the chief executive submits. Democrats oppose many of Trump’s plans, and the president’s Republican allies in Congress are divided on some budget issues.
Cuts in social programs
The Trump budget includes $3.6 trillion in cuts over 10 years, with some of the largest reductions in programs that help the poor pay for health care and buy food. A nutrition program known as “food stamps” currently serves more than 40 million people.
The budget proposal also follows Trump’s campaign promises to not to cut Social Security, a government-run old age pension program, or Medicare, which helps the elderly pay for doctors, hospitals and medicine.
Critics of Mr. Trump’s budget, including a group called “Campaign to Fix the Debt,” says these popular and expensive programs make up just more than half of government spending during the next 10 years. They say it is difficult to balance the budget without trimming spending on Social Security and Medicare.
Mulvaney explained the cuts in social programs as a desire to get people who are relying on federal programs when they should not be to go back to work.
House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi has said the Trump plan “guts investment in jobs and hollows out our economy,” and instead should be focused on investments in jobs, education, clean energy and medical research.
Google already monitors your online shopping – but now it’s also keeping an eye on what you’re buying in real-world stores as part of its latest effort to sell more digital advertising.
The offline tracking scans most credit and debit card transactions to help Google automatically inform merchants when their digital ads translate into sales at a brick-and-mortar store.
Google believes the data will show a cause-and-effect relationship between online ads and offline sales. If it works, that could help persuade merchants to boost their digital marketing budgets.
Google windfall
The Mountain View, California, company already runs the world’s biggest online ad network, one that raked in $79 billion in revenue last year. That puts it in the best position to capture any additional marketing dollars spent on computers and mobile devices.
Google plans to unveil the store-sales measurement tool Tuesday in San Francisco at an annual conference it hosts for its advertisers.
The gathering gives Google a prime opportunity to woo advertisers – one that it surely welcomes, given that it’s still trying to overcome a marketing boycott of its YouTube video site . The boycott began two months ago over concerns that Google hadn’t prevented major brand advertising from appearing alongside extremist video clips promoting hate and violence.
Google is also introducing several other features designed to help merchants drive more traffic to their physical stores and to gain a better understanding on how digital ads appearing across a variety of devices are affecting their sales.
Smarter ad tracking
Most of the new analytics twists draw upon Google’s inroads in “machine learning” – a way of “training” computers to behave more like humans – to interpret the data. Google’s search engine and Chrome web browser are a rich source of data about people’s interests and online activities that it can feed into machine-learning systems.
In the case of the store sales measure tool, Google’s computers are connecting the dots between what people look at after clicking on an online ad and then what they purchase with their credit and debit cards.
For instance, if someone searching for a pair of running shoes online clicked on an ad from a sporting goods store but didn’t buy anything, an advertiser might initially conclude that the ad was a waste of money. But Google says its new tool will now be able to tell if the same person bought the shoes a few days later at one of the advertiser’s brick-and-mortar stores.
Digital dossiers
Google says it has access to roughly 70 percent of U.S. credit and debit card transactions through partnerships with other companies that track that data. That means Google still won’t be able to document every purchase made using plastic – and it still has no way of knowing when people buy something with cash.
The digital dossiers that Google has compiled on the more than one billion people who use its search engine and other services, including Gmail, YouTube and Android, worry privacy watchdogs. Google gives its users the option to limit the company’s tracking and control what types of ads they are shown.
Google says its computers can collect identifying data triggered by online clicks and match it with other identifying information compiled by merchants and the issuers of credit and debit cards to figure out when a digital ad contributes to an offline purchase.
Shoppers remain anonymous, meaning they aren’t identified by their names, according to Google. And the company says it doesn’t share any of its anonymized information with its advertisers; instead, it targets ads at individuals who fit demographic profiles sought by advertisers.
British police say at least 22 people were killed and 59 wounded in an explosion Monday night outside a concert venue in Manchester, England.
“We have been treating this as a terrorist incident and we believe at this stage the attack last night was conducted by one man,” Ian Hopkins, chief constable of Greater Manchester Police, said Tuesday.
Hopkins said investigators believe the attacker was carrying an improvised explosive device, which he detonated, and that he died at the site.
Police are working with national counterterrorism and intelligence officials to figure out more details about the attacker with a priority on determining whether he was acting alone or as part of a network, Hopkins said.
The blast happened in the lobby of the 21,000 seat Manchester Arena at the end of a concert by American pop star Ariana Grande.
“Broken. From the bottom of my heart, I am so, so sorry,” Grande wrote on Twitter after the blast. “I don’t have words.”
“This was a barbaric attack, deliberately targeting some of the most vulnerable in our society, young people, children, out at a pop concert,” said British Home Secretary Amber Rudd.
British Prime Minister Theresa May said her thoughts are with the victims of what she called an “appalling terrorist attack.” May and Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the opposition Labour Party, agreed to suspend campaigning ahead of the country’s June 8 elections.
After the attack, Manchester police deployed hundreds of officers overnight and at one point conducted a precautionary controlled explosion near the arena of an object they later said turned out to not be anything suspicious.
Video from the concert showed thousands of concertgoers, many of them young girls, scrambling and screaming, trying to escape the building.
Some witnesses said the ground near the blast was covered with nuts and bolts.
Abandoned shoes, phones and jackets were scattered throughout the arena.
“It was a huge explosion. You could feel it in your chest. It was chaotic. Everybody was running and screaming just trying to get out,” a concertgoer told Reuters.
Worried parents who had brought their children to the show crowded the streets outside the building. A nearby hotel opened its doors to the kids looking for their mothers and fathers.
Cab drivers turned off their meters and offered to drive people from the ill-fated concert to wherever they want to go.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security said it was monitoring the situation in Manchester, and that it did not have any information showing a “specific credible threat” to music venues in the U.S.
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U.S. President Donald Trump stops at the Vatican Wednesday for a meeting with Pope Francis. It is the last of Trump’s visits to the seats of the world’s three Abrahamic religions. The first two – Saudi Arabia and Israel – were filled with symbolism, ceremony and history. But as VOA White House correspondent Peter Heinlein reports, this one will be shorter, less formal, and possibly more awkward.
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Bombing at Manchester Concert
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President Donald Trump is proposing to balance the federal budget within 10 years by slashing many social programs, including some that help the poor pay for food and medical care, called food stamps and Medicaid.
Officials have outlined some new details of the president’s first spending plan. A president’s budget has to be approved by Congress, so the final form is often quite different from what the chief executive proposes. Democrats oppose many of Trump’s plans, and the president’s Republican allies in Congress are divided on some budget issues.
In his campaign, Trump promised not to cut Social Security, a government-run old-age pension program, or Medicare, which helps elderly people pay for doctors, hospitals and medicine. That means deeper cuts to some other programs.
Critics of Trump’s budget, including a group called “Campaign to Fix the Debt,” says these popular and expensive programs make up just over half of government spending over the next 10 years. They say it is difficult to balance the budget without trimming this spending. They also say administration officials have based the budget on “unrealistic and rosy economic growth projections.”
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